Kenneth Fearing

Living and working in Greenwich Village from late 1931 or early 1932 to 1938, Neel came to know and identify with many bohemian writers and intellectuals in the neighborhood. Her portrait of poet, editor, and essayist Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961) shows the author immersed in his urban environs, which Neel painted at dusk and populated with images—some commonplace, others quite strange—drawn from his writing. Rejecting the traditional association of poetry as a rareified, elite art form, Fearing, the first poetry editor of the Marxist publication Partisan Review, positioned himself as a "proletarian" poet. Neel later recalled that she painted the skeleton in his chest because "his heart bled for the grief of the world." Neel’s artistic practice was similarly coextensive with her immediate environment and underpinned by Communist sympathies.